Inclusion of third-person perspective in CAVE-like immersive 3D virtual reality role-playing games for social reciprocity training of children with an autism spectrum disorder

• Published in: Universal access in the information society Vol. 20; no. 2; pp. 375 - 389
• Main Authors: Tsai, Wei-Te, Lee, I-Jui, Chen, Chien-Hsu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.06.2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Animation; Autism; Computer Communication Networks; Computer graphics; Computer Science; Computers and Society; Emotions; Games; Information Storage and Retrieval; Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); IT in Business; Long Paper; Reciprocity; Role playing; Training; User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction; Virtual environments; Virtual reality; Autism; CAVE-like immersive environments; Role-playing game; Empathy; Virtual Reality CAVE; Third-person perspective; Human–computer interaction
• DOI: 10.1007/s10209-020-00724-9
• ISSN: 1615-5289

The present study aimed to improve the ability of children with autism to recognize emotions correctly. We used our third-person perspective role-playing game (TPP-RPG) method to teach social skills and help develop an improved understanding of the six basic emotions. The experiment was divided into two phases: The first involved working with traditional figure card emotional recognition and the second involved a subject entering a 3D cave automatic virtual environment (CAVE) to engage with interactive games. While the traditional graphic card is a static picture that represents one of the six basic human emotions, the virtual reality of CAVE-like immersive 3D role-playing games enables the use of actual picture scene syntheses plus the animation of 3D characters to express emotions. The participating children were instructed to role-play with (1) three-dimensional (3D) virtual role animations and observe (2) two different real-time switchable role-play animations of themselves and their counterpart socially interacting. This single-subject study was based on multiple-baseline, across-subject design and involved 5 weeks of TPP-RPG training intervention. From this research activity, we found that the role-play performance of all three participants rose substantially during the intervention phase and remained significantly higher in the maintenance phase compared to their baseline levels.